Design and fabrication of a twin disc tribometer and a study of wear and friction of hardened 1060 steel under combined rolling and sliding

In this research work, wear of steel was studied under different loading and sliding conditions. A twin-disc tribometer was designed and built for studying wear of steels under combined rolling and sliding contact. The samples were made from 1060 steel in the form of circular discs and heat treatment was performed to attain hardness of ~330 HV. Thirteen sets of experimental conditions were made from six different normal loads and three different slip speeds. Experiments were split into eight intervals and run for a constant sliding distance of 1500 m. Wear track width was measured through image processing using which wear volume was estimated. Archard’s wear law was applied for the estimation of wear rates. The results demonstrate that experiments with lower slip speed has higher wear rates when compared to the experiments with higher slip speed. This indicates that for a constant sliding distance, slower the sliding under a rolling and sliding contact, higher the wear rate would be.